Tsubame-KFC: Supercomputer with Immersion Cooling System from Japan

In Japan, they sometimes come up with and create very strange devices, however, here they also usually create unique IT projects that quickly become known. For example, Tsubame-KFC is a supercomputer that uses a submersible cooling system. On such a cooling system, where the working equipment is immersed in the coolant (as is correct, mineral oil), Habré was written more than once. But there are practically no posts about Tsubame-KFC. But this is a supercomputer, which occupies the first line in the rating of Green 500 supercomputers. The rating itself was created to evaluate the most energy efficient supercomputers in the world.

Of course, this rating is not as well-known as the rating of “ordinary” supercomputers, but, nevertheless, it is worth paying attention to it. Interestingly, in this rating, the first 10 positions are now occupied by computer systems, including both regular processors from Intel and graphic processors from NVIDIA with coprocessors.
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It is worth paying attention to the above-mentioned computer system. The fact is that Tsubame-KFC (this system is installed at the Tokyo Institute of Technology) works with a fairly high efficiency, 4.5 gigaflops / watt. This is currently the best indicator among all supercomputers. The second line in the ranking is Wilkes (running in Cambridge) with a margin of 25%. The effectiveness of this supercomputer - 3.6 gigaflops per watt.

Tsubame is a supercomputer that is constantly being developed and improved. So, on Habré all the same flashed the news about Tsubame, back in 2008. Since then, the system has been greatly improved. Here not only the system performance indicators have been improved, but also, to a large extent, the energy efficiency indicators.

The Tsubame-KFC system (by the way, Tsubame in Japanese is a bird, and KFC stands for Kepler Fluid Cooled) uses two Intel Xeon E5 (Ivy Bridge) pairs and two NVIDIA Kepler K20 graphics processors. All this falls into a single cooling case, created by Green Revolution Cooling. The cooling case itself is called the CarnoJet.

For comparison, the energy efficiency of the Tsubame-KFC system can be taken from the corresponding rating of the most powerful supercomputer Tianhe-2 at the moment. Tianhe-2 shows a result of 1.9 gigaflops per watt. The performance of this system is 33.86 petaflops (quadrillion operations per second). As for Tsubame-KFC, it has already been written above that its result is 4.5 gigaflops / watt.



By the way, at the SC13 conference dedicated to supercomputers (it took place on November 23, in Denver, Colorado, USA), submersible cooling was one of the most popular topics for discussion. This type of cooling, according to the participants, is more efficient than air cooling systems. Of course, a completely different system is used here where additional equipment and materials are required. However, the submersible cooling system of computing technology is becoming increasingly popular.

For example, in China, a large data center was recently built (the owner company was not named), where a two-phase immersion cooling system is used. Such a system is usually applied to electrical equipment (transformers, inverters), as well as for cooling supercomputers (as mentioned above). Now we see that the submersible cooling system is also used for data centers, where money is saved for the installation and operation of conventional cooling systems. Among other things, the density of the equipment in this case is 10 times higher than in the case of air cooling.

The 500kW Chinese data center in question is, as a result, placed in a regular container. It can be assumed that over time the immersion cooling system will nevertheless take its rightful place within the data centers. Most likely, the air cooling system will not displace it, but it will become quite popular in some regions (and with increasing popularity, both the price of individual components and the system as a whole will fall).

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